Demystification of Gene: The People who made it Possible
Contents: Preface. 1. The wise old man of Babylon. 2. Mendel’s factor. 3. Johannsen’s gene. 4. Garrod’s study of Alkaptonuria, a disease that appeared hereditary. 5. Berzelius’s catalysts. 6. Pasteur’s vital force. 7. Kuhne’s enzyme. 8. Buchner’s alcohol production without live yeasts. 9. Sumner’s discovery – enzymes are proteins. 10. Mulder described the main constituent of albumin to be protein. 11. Suggestion of Hofmeister and Fischer that proteins consist of many amino acids linked to each other. 12. Beadle and Tatum’s one gene one enzyme hypothesis. 13. Frederick Griffith’s observation on Diplococcus pneumoniae. 14. Oswald Avery’s demonstration that the transforming principle of Griffith was nothing but DNA. 15. Friedrich Miescher had discovered DNA as early as 1869. 16. What is the chemical nature of DNA? 17. Erwin Chargaff determined the amounts of different bases of DNA. 18. In a bid to understand the three dimensional structure of DNA, Rosalind Franklin was successful in determining its X-ray diffraction pattern. 19. James Watson and Francis Crick constructed a molecular model of the double helical DNA. 20. Francis Crick, Sydney Brenner and co-workers demonstrated that three bases in DNA coded for one amino acid. 21. Francis Crick’s Central Dogma of molecular biology. 22. What is RNA? 23. Observations of Brachet implicated involvement of RNA in protein synthesis. 24. Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod mooted the concept of messenger RNA as carrier of message from DNA. 25. Search for the hypothetical messenger RNA of Jacob and Monod. 26. The RNA Tie club. 27. Marshal Nirenberg initiated cracking of the genetic code as a first step in understanding how proteins are made. 28. Har Gobind Khorana also played a stellar role in cracking the genetic code. 29. Severo Ochoa also played a role in cracking the genetic code. 30. The following are the genetic codes for the different amino acids. 31. Francis Crick’s adaptor hypothesis to explain how the protein synthesizing machinery translated the bases of the triplet codes in the messenger RNA into the amino acids. 32. Paul Zamecnik obtained the first clue of the intermediate step in protein synthesis for translating the triplet of bases in the messenger RNA into the amino acids. 33. Robert William Holley determined the base sequence of a transfer RNA and revealed the presence of an anticode in it. 34. Synthesis of proteins. 35. Recapitulation of the story in brief. Source locations.
Most people have only a vague idea about Gene to be something mysterious, which controls hereditary traits. This book covers the important developments in this area that have occurred over several thousand years and also the life of the people who contributed to the process of demystification of Gene, their joy and despair in their success and failure. The observations and experimentations have been explained in simple terms, so that any educated person, irrespective of his/her age and discipline, can follow and enjoy reading. Reviews about the book by some eminent academicians have been printed after the Preface.
